QAV Weekly Update 2026-03-20

Hi folks,

I hope you’re all hav­ing a great week. We are obvi­ous­ly still in a peri­od of great volatil­i­ty thanks to Trump’s Iran­ian adven­ture (it’s not a war, as Tony kept point­ing out in the week’s show). I’m doing my best to ignore the mar­ket day-to-day, just look­ing at my alerts in the evening and see­ing what I need to action the next day. No stress, just fol­low the mod­el. It all works out in the end.

So, let’s get into my week­ly updates and see where we are at.

All the Best,
Cam

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QAV MYTH KILLERS

On our Amer­i­can episode this week, while talk­ing about Colom­bian oil explo­ration out­fit GeoP­ark, we had rea­son to men­tion the clas­sic val­ue invest­ing book “What Works on Wall Street: A Guide to the Best-Per­form­ing Invest­ment Strate­gies of All Time” by James P. O’Shaugh­nessy (his cousin was a co-founder of GeoP­ark — their grand­fa­ther was an OG Amer­i­can wild­cat­ter).

This prompt­ed me to pull out WWOWS again and review it. This caught my eye.

In Chap­ter 2 “The Unre­li­able Experts: Get­ting in the Way of Out­stand­ing Per­for­mance”, he talks about deci­sion mak­ing, and the two basic mod­els peo­ple use to make deci­sions.

“Gen­er­al­ly, there are two ways to make pre­dic­tions. Most com­mon is for a per­son to run through a vari­ety of pos­si­ble out­comes in his or her head, essen­tial­ly rely­ing on knowl­edge, expe­ri­ence, and com­mon sense to reach a deci­sion. This is known as a “clin­i­cal” or intu­itive approach, and is the way tra­di­tion­al active mon­ey man­agers make choic­es. The stock ana­lyst may pore over a com­pa­ny’s finan­cial state­ments; inter­view man­age­ment; talk to cus­tomers and com­peti­tors; and final­ly try to make an over­all fore­cast. The grad­u­ate school admin­is­tra­tor might use a host of data, from col­lege grade point aver­age to inter­views with appli­cants, to deter­mine if stu­dents should be accept­ed. This type of judg­ment relies on the per­cep­tive­ness of the fore­cast­er.
The oth­er way to reach a deci­sion is the actu­ar­i­al, or quan­ti­ta­tive, approach. Here, the fore­cast­er makes no sub­jec­tive judg­ments. Empir­i­cal rela­tion­ships between the data and the desired out­come are used to reach con­clu­sions. This method relies sole­ly on proven rela­tion­ships using large sam­ples of data. The grad­u­ate school admin­is­tra­tor might use a mod­el that finds col­lege grade point aver­age high­ly cor­re­lat­ed to grad­u­ate school suc­cess and admit only those who have made a cer­tain grade. In almost every instance, from stock ana­lysts to doc­tors, we nat­u­ral­ly pre­fer qual­i­ta­tive, intu­itive meth­ods. In most instances, we’re wrong.

Jack Sawyer, a researcher who pub­lished a review of 45 stud­ies com­par­ing the two fore­cast­ing tech­niques: In none was the clin­i­cal, intu­itive method—the one favored by most peo­ple-found to be supe­ri­or. What’s more, Sawyer includ­ed instances where the human judges had more infor­ma­tion than the mod­el and were giv­en the results of the quan­ti­ta­tive mod­els before being asked for a pre­dic­tion. The human judges still failed to beat the actu­ar­i­al mod­els!”

As the Sawyer study was done in 1966, and is a lit­tle long in the tooth, I did some dig­ging into this the­o­ry that mod­els out-per­form human intu­ition, and found that while the orig­i­nal Sawyer review cov­ered 45 stud­ies, mod­ern meta-analy­ses now encom­pass hun­dreds of cas­es across med­i­cine, psy­chol­o­gy, finance, and crim­i­nal jus­tice, con­sis­tent­ly show­ing that mechanical/actuarial mod­els out­per­form human intu­ition by a mar­gin of 10% to 15% on aver­age.

How­ev­er, there are caveats.

1. The “Bro­ken Leg” Rule , devel­oped by Paul Meehl, an Amer­i­can clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist. He point­ed out that the most sig­nif­i­cant excep­tion is when a human pos­sess­es a sin­gle, high-valid­i­ty piece of infor­ma­tion that the mod­el was nev­er designed to account for. Exam­ple: If a mod­el pre­dicts a per­son will go to the cin­e­ma tonight based on a five-year pat­tern, but you know that per­son just broke their leg, you should over­rule the mod­el. The catch, how­ev­er, is that “Experts” tend to see “bro­ken legs” every­where. They mis­take “inter­est­ing” or “salient” infor­ma­tion for “pre­dic­tive” infor­ma­tion. To beat the mod­el, the human must only inter­vene for rare, high-impact facts that tru­ly negate the base rate.
2. High-Valid­i­ty Envi­ron­ments (Kah­ne­man & Klein). Daniel Kah­ne­man (who cham­pi­oned the mod­el-is-bet­ter view) and Gary Klein (who cham­pi­oned expert intu­ition) found a truce. They con­clud­ed that human intu­ition can be supe­ri­or, but only if two con­di­tions are met: The envi­ron­ment must have sta­ble, pre­dictable reg­u­lar­i­ties (e.g., fire­fight­ing, chess, anes­the­si­ol­o­gy). And the expert must have had years of prac­tice with imme­di­ate, high-qual­i­ty feed­back. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, they con­clud­ed that in “noisy” envi­ron­ments like psy­chi­a­try, polit­i­cal fore­cast­ing, or stock pick­ing, there is no “reg­u­lar­i­ty” for the brain to learn, and mod­els remain unde­feat­ed.

The bot­tom line for us as investors is that there’s a very high prob­a­bil­i­ty that our intu­ition is almost always going to be wrong.

What works best over the long term is a mod­el that tells us what to do.

I might think I know bet­ter than the mod­el. My gut feel­ing might tell me I should­n’t invest in, say, APOLLO TOURISM because they have let me down time after time (a ref­er­ence our long-time lis­ten­ers will under­stand).

I should ignore my gut feel­ing.

That’s prob­a­bly the hard­est les­son to learn. Our brains suck at mak­ing deci­sions. Lis­ten, brains are great. Nice work, evo­lu­tion. Sure, it took mil­lions of years and lots of side quests, but you did some­thing pret­ty cool.

But a mod­el will beat a brain almost every time.

Yeah yeah, the brains built the mod­els. Sure. So the brains win in the end.

But only if they let go of their feel­ing of supe­ri­or­i­ty and give in to the mod­els.

STOCK ANALYSIS OF THE WEEK

Despite the chaos in the mar­kets, I’ve found a few things to buy this week and you can see my Light posts here.

I also added some­thing to the U.S. Light port­fo­lio this week. U.S. Light and Club mem­bers can read about it here.

On the full Aus­tralian pod­cast this week, Tony did a deep dive on BFL. See the pod­cast link down below if you want to lis­ten to his analy­sis.

On the Amer­i­can episode, I did a deep dive on GPRK. See the pod­cast link down below if you want to lis­ten to my analy­sis.

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BUY LIST

Each week, we pro­duce a buy list based on our val­ue invest­ing sys­tem that we share with our QAV Club mem­bers. The intend­ed pri­ma­ry pur­pose of this buy list is for club mem­bers to use as a ref­er­ence for com­par­ing their own buy list. In the­o­ry, all of our buy lists should look pret­ty sim­i­lar each week.

Aus­tralian Club mem­bers can find my week­ly buy list here.

Below is a link to the US list for this week (avail­able to our U.S. Club mem­bers):

QAV Amer­i­can Val­ue Invest­ing Buy List 2026-03-18

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PORTFOLIOS

We com­pare our per­for­mance to what we think is the most rel­e­vant bench­mark (SPDR 200 in Aus­tralia, S&P500 in the USA), but if you’re new to invest­ing, these com­par­isons might not mean much. Instead, you can com­pare our per­for­mance to the top-per­form­ing Super Funds in Aus­tralia and see why an ama­teur active investor (who has a sys­tem to fol­low) can out-per­form most of the “pro­fes­sion­als”.

AUSTRALIAN

QAV DUMMY

Five Year Report: Over the last five years, our port­fo­lio is +14% p.a. vs the bench­mark +8.8% p.a.

Month­ly Report: The AU Dum­my Port­fo­lio was ‑9% p.a. for the last 30 days vs the bench­mark ‑5% p.a.

No changes to our port­fo­lio this week.

For FY26, our port­fo­lio is +13% vs +2.5% for the index.

QAV LIGHT

As of Mon­day this week (the last time I did a report), In the last 30 days, the Light port­fo­lio was ‑3.95% vs the index which was ‑2.43%.

Our best return for the last 30 days is still den­tal man­u­fac­tur­er SDI Lim­it­ed which is now up 40% for the month.

QAV LIGHT IS OUTPERFORMING THE MARKET

For the last 12 months, the Light port­fo­lio is +32.5% vs the index +15%.

Since incep­tion (Feb 2022), the Light port­fo­lio is +17.7% p.a. vs the index +10%.

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Become a QAV Light Member today and start your investing on the right track

If you want to find out what we’re trad­ing in QAV Light each week, sign up to become a mem­ber. You’ll get an email from me every Mon­day let­ting you know what we’re buy­ing and sell­ing in that port­fo­lio. You can choose to copy our trades or not. It’s the eas­i­est way to start your rules-based invest­ing career… and you don’t even need to know the rules. I’ll fol­low the rules for you. It’s a good first step to even­tu­al­ly becom­ing a QAV Club mem­ber and learn­ing how to run the sys­tem by your­self.

(Note: Amer­i­cans inter­est­ed in join­ing QAV Light or Club please go here instead.)

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AMERICAN

QAV DUMMY

Since incep­tion (Sep 2023), our port­fo­lio is +89% vs the S&P 500 +48%. Not quite dou­ble mar­ket but pret­ty close.

Our U.S. port­fo­lio for the last 30 days was ‑7.6% vs ‑3.7% for the S&P 500.

No trades this week.

QAV LIGHT

I recent­ly start­ed our U.S. Light port­fo­lio, and it’s off to a slow start, cur­rent­ly ‑1% vs the S&P 500 ‑4%.

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THIS WEEK’S EPISODES

Entan­gled Inter­ests – QAV AU 911

The Crude and the Ruth­less (GPRK) – QAV AMERICA 44

STOCK NEWS AND UPDATES

COMMODITIES

This week the big changes to com­modi­ties were the fol­low­ing :
Iron Ore SELL (although I’m hold­ing off on sell­ing my FEX, as the price is trend­ing upwards and it’s a weird sell line, with Feb 2026 as L1 due to the flat line rule)
Gold BUY
Steel SELL
LNG SELL
Nick­el JOSEPHINE
Wheat JOSEPHINE
Lithi­um BUY

DISCLOSURE

Please review our trad­ing and dis­clo­sure pol­i­cy.

SIGNING OFF

Well that’s it for this week! Keep focused and don’t let the mar­ket volatil­i­ty scare you. As I said in last week’s arti­cle, volatil­i­ty is nor­mal. If we want to have long-term suc­cess in invest­ing, we have to get used to volatil­i­ty, avoid using our gut feel­ings, and just fol­low the mod­el.

SSDD!

• Cam

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That’s it for the week!

QAV A GOOD SHAREMARKET!

Got a ques­tion? [email protected]